This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Alberta: Where good help is hard to keep

Despite the booming energy sector and the lure of good-paying jobs, Alberta is having trouble retaining out-of-province workers, according to a recent Statistics Canada study.

Jessie Richardson, 22, is happy to be home in Hamilton after living in Edmonton for six months. She found a good job there in the health-care industry and made friends, but decided to go back to school in Ontario.
(Glenn Lowson / for the Toronto Star)

It was about a year ago that Jessie Richardson made some life-changing decisions.

She wanted to leave Hamilton, she wanted to discover a new part of Canada and she wanted to make money. So Richardson, 22, left her Ontario hometown and booked a flight to Edmonton.

Adjusting took a bit of time, but she eventually found a good job in the health-care industry, made friends and found her place.

But in May, she came home and decided to go back to school. Her decision to move to Alberta, make some money and then run highlights a pattern Alberta is increasingly seeing — most Canadians who head west don’t stay.

A recent Statistics Canada study shows that despite the booming energy sector and the lure of good-paying jobs, Alberta is having trouble retaining out-of-province workers — despite the fact that half of those workers are under 35 and most of them are single.

Article Continued Below

The report looks at interprovincial migration from 2004 to 2009 and found that in 2004, there were approximately 62,000 to 67,500 interprovincial employees in Alberta. By 2008, the number of interprovincial employees had increased to up to 133,000, almost double the 2004 numbers. The majority worked in oil and gas extraction or construction.

But many migrants can’t quite commit. The overwhelming majority — from 74 to 87 per cent of people, depending on the year — never planted permanent roots in Alberta.

The question is why, and what kind of impact will it have in the long term.

The StatsCan report identifies several factors that keep people from settling down, including “family ties, social networks, organizational arrangements (e.g. daycare, school enrolment), home ownership, and quality of life.”

Kevin McQuillan, sociology professor at the University of Calgary, says people working in the resource areas in the northern part of the province don’t see the area as a place to settle down — they see it as a place to make money.

In many cases, he said, workers aren’t getting much exposure to Calgary, Edmonton and other cities, where they’d be more likely to move permanently.

McQuillan added that the rapid population growth — via immigration and a high birth rate — is probably enough to dull the sting of losing workers who return to their home provinces.

“I think there’s a comfort with the level of growth in the province right now,” he said.

“But I do think it does raise some questions about the ability of the province, longer term, to retain skilled workers. I think that’s going to be an important issue,” he said, noting out-of-province workers don’t pay provincial income taxes to Alberta.

Aaron Toth, a sheet metal worker from Chateauguay, Que., has been commuting to northern Alberta for six years. He works 21 days in a row and 12 hours a day before taking a week off. That gruelling lifestyle earns him $180,000 a year.

But life up in the work camps can be rough — many colleagues have a hard time being away from their families and cope by using drugs and alcohol, he said.

Toth, 29, said it wasn’t easy keeping up a long-distance relationship while working out of the province. He and his girlfriend recently broke up, but he’s still not looking to leave Quebec.

He said Alberta’s big cities don’t compare to Montreal, the nearest big city to his hometown.

His boss, Matthew Verhoek, has a decidedly different opinion of the province — he loves it.

Verhoek’s father moved his family from northern Manitoba to Red Deer, Alta. for a job making module pipe racks destined for Fort McMurray when Verhoek was 16. Now 31, he said he’s never thought about leaving Alberta.

But when asked if he wants to stay up north for the foreseeable future, his answer is less emphatic.

“There’s always that hope that you’ll get a good paying job at home, but you look around and see all the 40-, 50-, 60-year-old guys that have been hoping now for 30 years, and you don’t get your hopes up.”

The province of Alberta says it is focusing on those who are staying, and points out that its population has grown by 500,000 over the last five years.

Alberta expects to have a population of 4 million by the end of the year, said Darrell Winwood, spokesman for Alberta’s ministry of enterprise and advanced education.

“We feel quite confident that we’re attracting people, we’re looking to add to our labour force, our workforce, and that people are coming here for the opportunities,” Winwood said.

Lars Osberg, the McCulloch professor of economics at Dalhousie University, said there are a lot of benefits to having temporary workers because they aren’t a drain on the system.

The two government services that people tend to use most are the health-care system and school system — services that people use in their home provinces, Osberg said.

If they’re travelling back and forth, it likely means their kids are in schools in their home provinces, and they’re keeping their out of province health cards, he said. So even if they require treatment in Alberta, it will likely be billed back to the government of wherever they’re from.

Richardson, the Hamilton woman, considered going to Fort McMurray, the epicentre of the energy boom. But she eventually decided the city wasn’t for her before settling down in Edmonton.

Richardson said she also found many of her peers in Alberta were blinded by the promise of higher wages and didn’t realize they would, in some cases, work longer and more hours than they used to. She worked in a retail store before landing her health-care job, where she made $20 an hour.

Despite the fact that Alberta didn’t initially live up to her expectations, said she enjoyed herself there and hasn’t ruled out a return to Edmonton someday.

Her experience, she added, taught her that working long hours made no sense if she wasn’t invested her job, and “that no matter how much money I was earning, I had to do what I love. You have to follow your passion.”

By the numbers

133,000: Approx number of interprovincial employees in Alberta in 2008

$186,782: The median family income in Fort McMurray, the highest income in Canada

22,777: Number of Ontarians who worked in Alberta in 2008, 2.5 times more than in 2004

32,166: Number of Atlantic Canadians who worked in Alberta in 2008, four times more than in 2004

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com